The Revue Spirite, edited by that honoured and thoughtful French spiritist, our friend, Mr. Leymarie, F.T.S., has devoted many pages to Theosophy during the past three years, and commended our Society’s plans and principles to public notice. In a recent issue appears a review of our progress from the beginning to the present time.
“We may say,” it remarks, “that even now this Society is on the highroad towards a grand success. Its birth seems likely to be the beginning of a most important philosophical and religious movement in both hemispheres; while at the same time contributing to a moral regeneration among the Hindus, so sadly degenerated by centuries of different oppressions. . . . In our opinion the Theosophical Society is a great centre of research, and its magazine, The Theosophist, the channel through which we (Europeans) may to a certain extent share in the same.”
For the magnetists none, of course, are so well authorized to speak as Baron Du Potet and Mr. Alphonse Cahagnet. The former wrote us (see Vol. I, p. 117):
“Receive me, then, as one closely identified with your labors, and rest assured that the remainder of my life will be consecrated to the researches that your great Indian sages have opened out for us.”
The latter said:
“The foundation of such a Society as yours has always been the dream of my life.”
History teems with examples of the foundation of sects, churches, and parties by persons who, like ourselves, have launched new ideas. Let those who would be apostles and write infallible revelations do so, we have no new church but only an old truth to commend to the world. Ours is no such ambition. On the contrary, we set our faces like flint against any such misuse of our Society. If we can only set a good example and stimulate to a better way of living, it is enough. Man’s best guide, religious, moral, and philosophical, is his own inner, divine sense. Instead of clinging to the skirts of any leader in passive inertia he should lean upon that better self—his own prophet, apostle, priest, king, and saviour. No matter what his religion, he will find within his own nature the holiest of temples, the divinest of revelations.